Month: April 2018

In Which the Sheep Get Naked

This photo of me is evidence against a picture being worth a thousand words. In this photo, I appear relaxed and competent. In control. I am none of those. Within ninety seconds of this photo, the photographer has to drop the camera and rescue me, as I realize that my arms are too short to reach the hind end of the wiggling sheep. So this photo simply creates a debt requiring nearly a thousand words to correct it.

It is almost true that the shearing begins with me looking skillful and the ewe looking docile. I am prepared. I have watched a man shear a sheep at Plumpton College, East Sussex, UK, gentle in both his British accent and his handling techniques. He shears the sheep in less than five minutes. By my seventh viewing, I am standing beside my computer, pantomiming his movements, learning the choreography I need to perform by this evening. When the cat wanders over, I set her on her rump, tuck her right foreleg behind mine, and shear her brisket with imaginary clippers.

I arrange things in the barn. Plug in the clippers. Oil them. Flip the switch. They are much louder and heavier than they looked on the video. To get the feel, I lift my pant leg and run them up my shin. They buzz on my skin. Fiddling with the angle, I trim my winter-long leg hairs.

When Andrew gets home, I am ready. We wrangle a reluctant Rhubarb from the pen. I inform Andrew that I will hold her and shear her, as this approach will give me the best access for efficiency.

“Then what will I do?”

“Take pictures,” I say.

All I need is to get Rhubarb alongside my legs, facing my right. Then, while I turn her nose towards her side with my right hand, I lean over her, reach my left hand under her belly for her right hind leg, and…I cannot reach her leg. The year’s worth of wool makes her too rotund to get my arms around her in any direction. I grunt around on the mess of woolly sheep for a minute, then Andrew helps. When Rhubarb leans quietly against my legs, Andrew hands me the clippers. He stands back and takes the photo.

My arms feel too short and weak. My back seizes within minutes. I nick her skin, once when she wiggles and once when she doesn’t. Trying to protect her skin, I shear off the pad of my left ring fingertip, run down to the house, drip blood across the kitchen floor, get woozy in the bathroom while Stella cries because she wants to see it before I bandage it, reassure her with my head between my knees, bandage it, and run back to keep shearing before I lose my nerve because there is our sheep with a third of her fleece dangling from her, waiting on her rump in Andrew’s arms.

None of my memorized choreography works for me. I realize that a smallish woman with large sheep cannot expect to work the same moves as a large man with a smallish sheep and untold hours of experience. Kneeling beside Rhubarb, I talk us through it. “You’ll feel so much better afterwards. Just a little more, then this wool will be gone. You will be just you.” Ha, I think. Ewe.

After an undisclosable amount of time in the menacing clipper drone, we all three stand, panting. Rhubarb—naked—rejoins Parsnip, who now looks enormous. My adrenaline dissolves, and I could fall asleep in our late supper of leftover spaghetti. Parsnip will wait until tomorrow.

The next day, I find another tutorial—How to Shear a Sheep in 20 Steps—similarly impossible looking, but better matching my ergonomic realities. We handle Parsnip more smoothly, despite her more feisty behavior. The shears balance better in my hand. I swear only once, at a single nick on her leg, and sustain no injuries myself. In half the previous time, Parsnip is nibbling hay while Rhubarb sniffs her in disbelief.

Watching them, I feel that disbelief too. We did it. The photo is not a complete deception; it is worth something. It is a reminder for me. The story is always more messy than a single frame can describe. Our thousand words are more complicated and compelling, more engaging and relatable, than one glance at someone’s life. It is always worth listening.

Note: This is the wool of one sheep. One.

 

Snow and the Painted Ladies

Thirty-nine inches of snow fell one day in March, towering into drifts along our house and over the fence. Inside, I had gone dormant, curled into smallness and slowing myself protectively. The blizzard, though, dragged me outside. Wind blew the snow into our eyebrows. Crusts froze on our hats and shoulders, but shoveling warmed us. It felt good to have something to fling ourselves against, together.

We started by the road and worked our way towards the well-buried cars. One foot after breakfast. One foot after lunch. Another foot late afternoon. Always revisiting the pile left by plows along the road. Each time we lifted the snow higher at the edges. In that blizzard, and the next few snows, adventure leavened the work.

March ended, though, with snow on the ground, less like a lamb and more like a dead fish. April’s snows have been a series of small betrayals, echoing my experiences in the past several months. Quiet months. I have been quietly resting and working.

At work yesterday, I euthanized eight animals. I took one dog’s shiny black face in my hands before I pushed the syringe. She released her head to me. My thumbs stroked her ears. Good dog. Sweet baby.

When someone is dead, they are dead. The excruciating effort of finding life after death is for the living, not the dead. Easter brings one of my favorite seasons because the old stories seem fresh; there is awakening and unfolding. Even the large snow patches do not stop water from rushing down the ditches. Buds fatten on grey branches. The hens and ducks race around outside again, pecking and dabbling. My legs exalt in striding between the barns unhindered.

Once last spring, I followed a hen to her hidden nest in the barn. As she crooned and postured, I spent twenty minutes with my camera focused on her butt fluff, waiting to capture the shiny wet egg escaping her body. I am that kind of optimist. But she decided to wait for more privacy to reveal her daily miracle.

This morning I am tending the improbable butterflies. A gift. Over thirty painted ladies, emerged from their chrysalides. Many of them sit folded. They seem too still. I refresh the cotton balls in honey water and move them to a warmer spot. I watch the painted ladies open and close and stagger over each other to find sweetness, uncoil a proboscis. I wonder if they will die the moment we release them, or fly off in subtle, fragile glory—allowing us our illusions.

More likely, they will do neither. They will remain—motionless in the cold spring—poised at the edge of death and life. And we will continue to wonder.